Not on your life, asshole.
Once they’d passed, Eric dropped from the top of the wall. The landscape was largely lawn, dotted here and there with bushes and short palms. None of them would provide actual cover, but he could blend with the shadows easily enough if no one were actually looking. He plotted his course and dashed
from one to the next until he reached the building.
Like many a fancy Mexican home, Velasquez’s property had a tile roof and stucco walls. Stucco was a fucking bitch to climb. This had seen better days, so it was possible no one would notice the prints and scrapes he would have to leave if he free-climbed, but if they were holding captives, they’d be paying more attention than the average homeowner. Rope was a much better idea. He flattened himself against the wall and pulled the rope launcher from his backpack. He’d practiced with it plenty but had only actually used it one other time, so he sent up a brief prayer and fired. The hook stayed on the roof, which was better than the first time he’d tried to use the damned thing and almost lost an eye when it came flying right back down at him. He tugged the rope, heard the metal skitter over the tiles, the sound as loud as a train bearing down on him, and froze. But no one else seemed to have noticed. Cautiously, he tugged again, and the hooks caught.
Thank you, God.
Now he just had to worry about anyone who might look up and see a large, black figure against the white stucco. Hand over hand, he climbed as fast as he could, looping the rope over the hook at his belt as he went so no one would discover it hanging, until he reached the window Trey had pointed out. He pressed himself against it and took a deep breath. Here he wouldn’t be seen nearly so easily from the outside.
From his precarious position, NVGs in place, he could see both Jane and Dani, their bodies outlined in alien green glow. Jane was sitting up in the bed. She held a book, a big one, but she wasn’t reading. A chair was propped with its back beneath the bedroom door, but she held the book like a weapon. She squinted at the window. Without taking her eyes off him, she reached out and shook Dani awake. When the other woman started to speak, Jane clapped a hand over her mouth and put a finger to her own lips. Then she indicated Dani should hide behind the side of the bed opposite the window. Dani obeyed, but her head kept popping up to watch Jane.
Jane flattened herself against the bedroom wall and approached cautiously. She might not be a trained operative, but she learned fast—her position would make it difficult for him to fire upon her, should that have been his intent. He yanked off his cap and shoved the NVGs up on his head. Not much he could do about his dark hair and lack of beard, but maybe she’d recognize him anyway.
He saw the minute she did. Her fingers flew to the latch, and she unlocked the window and shoved it up. The screen popped out easily, and Eric slipped into the room as quietly as possible, bringing the rope inside with him. Jane threw herself against him. Fuck. There were so many things he wanted to say to her, but what if the room was bugged? Her earlier actions, silencing Dani, indicated it might be. So he settled for wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight against his heart. She was safe. For the moment, she was whole and well.
When his breathing stabilized, he loosened his hold on Jane and detached the rope, hitting the button on his belt that retracted it. The hook and rope would still be on the roof, but at least no one would see it from the ground.
Dani popped up from behind the bed. She grabbed a pad from the nightstand, scribbled on it, and held it up.
What’s going on?
Jane looked at him, and for the first time he realized tears dripped down her face. Ah, Christ. Holding her hand, he sat on the bed, drawing her down beside him, and took the pad from Dani.
I can’t get you out tonight, but we’re coming for you. I promise. Do you know where Alvaro is being kept?
Dani wrote down what she knew about Alvaro’s basement cell, and Eric nodded.
I need as much information as you have about what’s going on here. He tapped the pen against his lips. Jane had a nightmare. It woke you up. Talk about the experiments. The more details we have, the better we can plan.
Jane nodded. She drew a breath and let it out in a little shriek. Not enough to bring anyone running, but enough to have startled Dani from sleep.
“Jane?” Dani did a credible job sounding freshly woken.
“Oh God, Dani, I just had the freakiest nightmare.”
“What was it?”
“We did it. We completed Warlock.”
“Were they . . . selling us?”
Every nerve fired in screaming fury. He should have expected it. With Tenancingo home to so much human trafficking and the Hijos involved up to their collective necks, it was the most logical way to get rid of two women who no longer served any purpose, but he still had to clamp down with all his strength to prevent himself from tearing open the door and going after their enemies barehanded.
“No.” Jane stroked his thigh, silently begging him to calm down.
“So what was the nightmare?” Dani asked.
“That was the nightmare. You know what we’re working on, Dani. Let’s pretend for a minute we find a way to create a conscienceless, fearless killing machine. The first time one of those ‘perfect soldiers’ turns on Velasquez, which would totally happen despite all the subliminal sleep messages in the world, you know who’s going to be blamed.”
“Even with the data they made me steal from AHI before I left,” Dani said, “it’s not likely we’ll actually find a combination of drugs and behavior mods that will work. Not that that’s such a happy thought, either. I mean, how long do you think they’ll keep us around if we don’t? Velasquez seemed pretty impatient at dinner.”
“He wants his supersoldiers. They’re closer than I’m comfortable with, and it’s not like you or I are in any position to stop them. If we don’t help, Alvaro will suffer. At least for the moment they seem to be keeping him relatively comfortable despite having broken his finger.”
Dani wrapped her arms around herself, and Eric touched her shoulder in sympathy. She was blaming herself for her brother’s injury, which was, of course, the way psychological torture worked.
What a clusterfuck. They couldn’t leave the lab standing. It and all the associated research had to be destroyed. Which meant they had to find the American investor, too, if he existed. No way could they afford to let a cartel—or anyone else—create an army of sociopaths.
Jane picked up the pad. Is that enough? We don’t know any more.
It’s enough. We will come for you at night. Probably tomorrow, the next night at the latest. Be here. He underlined the last word three times, and she nodded.
• • •
ONCE ERIC HAD left, hugging her fiercely before sliding three stories to the ground down a long rope that she then tossed down to him, Jane tore up the paper they’d written on and flushed it down the toilet. Dani had questions, Jane could tell, but she wasn’t ready to discuss Eric, what he meant to her, why he might be there, because she didn’t have answers. He’d referred to others being with him. How many? Were they on an assignment from Nash Harper, or just doing Eric a favor? How could they possibly rescue her, Dani, and Alvaro with just a few guys against all the armed men she’d seen around the compound?
Although, with his ropes and the big black pistol in his shoulder holster and the knife in his belt, Eric seemed a little better equipped than she would have expected. How had he gotten from New York to Mexico with the weapons when she still had to take her damned shoes off in the security lines?
So maybe, maybe there was hope. She’d felt it when he held her. For the first time since waking up in this place, her heart had settled back out of her throat, her nerves had calmed, and the promise of security seemed within reach.
She lay awake for the rest of the night, counting the bumps in the plaster ceiling and listening to Dani—who finally gave up s
taring at her and fell asleep—snore softly.
Chapter 10
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, much to Jane’s dismay, Velasquez and Bryan were both at the breakfast table when she and Dani went downstairs.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Where’s Alvaro?” Dani added.
“Your brother has a little something he’d like to show you,” said Bryan. He nodded to Nose, who stood at the kitchen door. “He’s been helping us out, and I’m really quite proud of what we’ve accomplished together.”
Nose led Alvaro into the room, and Bryan held up a Taser. “Alvaro, what would you say if I told you I was going to use this on you?”
Jane studied Alvaro’s dark eyes but saw no reaction. He shrugged.
“Very well,” said Bryan. He pressed the small device into Alvaro’s side, and the boy folded, collapsed into a twitching heap. Dani shrieked and ran to him. Bryan yanked her up, a gun to her head. “Get back. He doesn’t need your pitiful mewling.” He held out a hand and Alvaro took it. When the boy was standing, Bryan smiled at him.
“Did that hurt?”
Alvaro shrugged.
“Do you want me to do it again?”
Another shrug.
“What about if I told you to go over there and do it to your sister?”
Alvaro held out a hand for the Taser. Jane stepped in front of Dani, who was still sobbing and calling her brother’s name. Instead of handing the boy the Taser, however, Bryan asked another question.
“What if I told you to shoot your sister?” He put the gun into Alvaro’s hand, and the kid pointed it straight at Jane’s face.
“Get out of the fucking way,” he said. They were the first words she’d heard him speak.
A guard yanked Jane’s arm and dragged her across the room, leaving Dani exposed. Jane shouted at her to run, but she stood there, tears running down her cheeks, her lips moving soundlessly.
Alvaro steadied his good hand with his bad one and fired.
Jane’s knees went out from under her, and she hit the floor, choking on bile. Dani, however, remained on her feet. Alvaro fired again and again until the magazine was empty.
“Oops,” said Bryan cheerfully, “must have been blanks.”
Dani crumpled and Jane crawled over to her. She was out cold, her breathing shallow, her pulse fast. Shock.
“You see, Jane,” Bryan continued, “I don’t think you’re working as hard as you could be. You need a little more inspiration. So Daniela here is going to join her brother in our human-subjects trials. She doesn’t have the physical strength we are after for most of our work, but she’s damned good-looking. A woman who proves as biddable as young Alvaro here could bring a good price. No worries about keeping her locked up, no fear she’ll go to the cops, just a hot body ready to please . . . or, of course, kill your enemies on command.”
Jane swallowed the acid in her throat. “How’s that any different than what you have planned for us if I do manage to work faster?”
He considered. “I’ll make you a deal. You finish Warlock before I break Dani down and retrain her, and you can have her back and you can both stay here as scientists.”
“Finish it? It looks to me as if you finished it just fine without me.”
Velasquez stood. “Don’t play games with me, Dr. Evans. Alvaro represents a fine start, but broken men are nothing more than cannon fodder. We have been creating them for decades. Dr. Axlerod has sped the process up considerably. In fact, I am quite happy with his progress in that area, but we need soldiers, not drones. Men who can think for themselves, who retain the ability for reason and creative thought. Alvaro Peralta has neither.
“However, we will provide you with his history so you can see how he was broken. Perhaps it will . . . assist your research. You must remember that whatever is necessary to activate the reaction you are searching for can and will be done. If a person’s own brain does not create enough electricity to provide the reaction, we can give an external, shall we say, boost.”
The Taser flashed through Jane’s mind. She’d seen a few notes on electrical-shock treatments in the research the first day she’d paged through the research, but she ignored any potential use of that, strobe lights, or the other behavior-modification regimens discussed. Yes, the brain was basically just a big electrical system, and yes, sometimes sending a brief shock through it was beneficial, but she had a feeling that wasn’t what Velasquez had in mind.
The literature on what had been done to Alvaro proved her correct. It also set her guts on fire. How could a sane person do these things to someone else? She understood mental illness. Psychosis, obsession, even rage, either outward or turned inward as depression—these were the causes she could understand for torture and rape and murder. But the cold, logical decision to hurt others for your own benefit? It was beyond her.
In the lab, experiments continued. Midafternoon, two of the lab rats chattered excitedly in Spanish at one of the stations. She couldn’t understand them, but whatever had them so intrigued, it couldn’t be good. They didn’t call her over, however, asking for Bryan instead. He examined their findings through a microscope, then repeated whatever they had done.
“Can I help?” Jane asked finally. She had to find out what they’d discovered or she couldn’t derail it.
“I don’t think so,” Bryan said. “This… beautiful. One of those elegant answers that only arises when people think in truly big terms. One of these men, you see, has a child. That child learned yesterday that fire was hot as well as bright. It’s a lesson he won’t forget. Manuel realized that when we use the kind of desensitization techniques we’ve been using on Alvaro, we burn out their will. That’s a bad idea. But if they aren’t afraid of pain to begin with, if they learn that pain doesn’t hurt, well, that’s a different matter.”
There it was, the very thing Jane had been terrified they’d figure out. She’d understood it from the first, though only because she’d known a woman in med school whose twin brother had hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy, which had prompted her interest in medicine. As rare as the family of HSAN disorders was, however, CIP—congenital insensitivity to pain—was rarer still and yet more devastating. She’d never met an actual case. Congenital analgesia had no known cause, though researchers had identified two separate affected genes.
Still, being able to predict the disorder based on affected genes and the proteins they did or did not create was very different from being able to change those genes or proteins at will. The reminder calmed her. If Manuel had only made his realization the night before, they couldn’t be very far along. And Bryan was a chemist, not a medical doctor. What were the chances he’d kept up with any of the research? Even if he had, she hadn’t heard of anyone working on synthesizing new analgesics from the genetic research, so he’d have to start from scratch. And before he could do that, Eric would have gotten her out. So today, she had to pretend to help, enough so she could possibly see Dani again.
“But pain is necessary,” she said. Bryan would expect that. “Kids who don’t feel it do things like bite off their tongues and fingertips. If you create a group of guys that don’t feel pain, you’ll lose a crap-ton of them to minor injuries that get infected. A guy who doesn’t feel a snakebite won’t get the antivenin shot. They have to be able to feel it. . . . What you want to do is dull it, so they feel it but not badly enough to stop what they’re doing if it’s important.”
“Interesting. That’s the first time you’ve said anything useful since you got here. But overdosing these men on oxy isn’t a viable answer.”
“It wouldn’t matter. Prophylactic use of analgesics doesn’t help with sudden pain. Especially for long-term users. If you want a guy to keep going after he’s been stabbed, which is I assume what you’re after, you have to dull his reaction to pain, without dulling his reflexes. That’s a neurotransmitter issue.”
&nbs
p; “Do you know which neurotransmitters?”
“Not off the top of my head. Pain isn’t my field. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out, though, assuming they’ve been identified in the journals. Have your guys do it. Or have me do it. Give me Dani and we’ll do it twice as fast.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would.”
“Sorry, that wasn’t the deal.”
“Fine. Give me a computer, and I’ll get to work on the research.”
At that, he actually laughed out loud. “And have you contact your friends at HSE and tell them all about us?”
Her stomach dropped. How did he know about Eric?
“Clive did well hiring HSE after we took Dani. Velasquez was decidedly pissed off that you proved so difficult to abduct. Waiting isn’t his strong suit, but I knew they’d leave you alone after the press conference. So no, you won’t be getting anywhere near a computer with Internet access. I’ll provide you with a typist. You tell him what to search for and where, and he will look it up. He’ll print the results, and you can go through them.”
“That will take forever!”
“Best I can do. It’s your own fault for not figuring this out until you and Daniela had been separated.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Jane sat with a pen and pad, industriously writing down what to research and where, passing sheets to her new assistant whenever he came by to drop a pile of paperwork next to her. She also scanned his findings, throwing most of them out but keeping a few that looked promising. Bryan had to believe she was actually working, actually trying to help.
When they were released to get ready for dinner, Jane took a pile of the paperwork with her. She’d managed to keep the majority of the good stuff to herself, putting it aside for “further attention.” Not that Bryan couldn’t re-create her searches and find the articles again, but if she could slow him down by taking the work with her when Eric came, she’d give the proper authorities—and she had no clue who that even was at this point—more time to clean out the house and lab before Bryan got too far along in his research.
Mind Games Page 16